This week’s Monday Movie is about how you can create a light glare effect in your renders both in Photoshop and using mental ray’s “Glare” shader.  I wasn’t sure I’d have this tutorial out in time, but it actually came together pretty well!

The glare effect in 3dsMax is basically the process of looking for super-bright pixels in the rendering and blurring them on their own layer.  You can do this in Photoshop after the render, but it doesn’t take into account the brightness of the pixels (i.e. white and ‘light-emitting are identical).  Thus, by generating a glare layer, you have a lot of control over how your final render looks in 3dsMax.  If you’re working on photo-real work like architectural visualization or product rendering, this is exactly the kind of technique you need in your repertoire!

Also, I’m afraid I haven’t made enough progress on my side project to fully unveil it.  However, I’m looking to create a tutorial collection website that will be the largest, most searchable 3dsMax tutorial database out there!  How do I plan to do this?  Well, you’ll find out!  But the good news is that it’ll have minimal advertisements, ratings, and tons of healthy learning opportunities.  More to follow as it happens.

Long story short, I’m still working on that new website I told you about, and I haven’t had much time for new tutorials. While it won’t get in the way of my most important commitment- the Monday Movies, it is delaying most other things. I’ll have more 3dsMax tutorials for you soon, I promise!

In order to placate your thirst for fresh content, I’ve dredged up my favorite beverage commercials from a few years ago.  I’m not sure if Coca-Cola still makes Vault, but I remember it being a very delicious drink.  It was a little sweeter than 7-up’s dn-L soda (get it?) and had a little more caffeine than Mountain Dew.  It also had funny commercials where the announcer was basically inspiring these boring men to do extraordinary things while drinking the product.  You’ll get the idea.  Be careful with these videos since they’re all uploaded by different people, so the volume is different across each one.  Don’t turn the volume too high or too low.

Expect a Monday Movie next week, and hopefully the official announcement of my “secret project” around the same time!

This week’s Monday Movie is a little shorter.  I’m working on a big project that you’re going to love, so in the meantime I’ve gone a little quiet.

This week we’re looking at a quick, cheap technique for creating grille meshes.  Opacity mapping is a pretty ordinary technique that can do some extraordinary things for distant objects.  If I were to model all these tiny holes, you can be sure it’ll make my render times tank!

This week we’re covering Depth of Field in 3dsMax for both the scanline and mental ray renderers. It’s more of a patch to the Depth of Field Primer I wrote, since it seems like a lot of viewers were coming to the page looking for a “how-to” rather than a “why”. Thus, we’ll cover exactly how to create and control the depth of field effect.

On another note, it seems like everyone on the planet has heard the song above but me. Ignoring the cheesy ’80s undertones, “Puttin’ on the Ritz” is practically my theme song! It’s based on a really old tune (c1920?), and takes on a deep, cryptic interpretation that makes it so solid. It doesn’t get much better than that. If you really listen closely, you can pick up that vintage edge- who’s Gary Cooper?

In this Monday Movie I show you how to tweak mental ray displacement settings in 3dsMax. Learn how to speed up your renders by approximating displacement more roughly, or really juice your displacement maps by getting sub-pixel displacement!

Sorry about the lousy encoding, my computer’s been acting up something fierce these days. This weekend I’ll hopefully get a fresh install going and that’ll give me the edge on next week’s Monday Movie. In the meantime, I hope you enjoyed those steampunk reference images!